[split] An interview with Stephen Bax - 1 to 1 substitution discussion

[-JKP-]

The question was how do you resolve the problem of there not being enough glyphs to encode all the other sounds if you use three glyphs for one sound-family. The VMS's character set is restrained to begin with. Use three-for-one and it becomes even more restrained. 

I am sorry, JKP. I thought you asked a question "to all of us" and I did my best to reply. The question seemed to be if we believe that the VMS is a one-to-one substitution code. My poor English, I guess.

Be patient, but I need clarification also on the sentence above. The meaning of "all the other sounds" is unclear to me. Do you think there is a universal set of sounds common to all languages? Or maybe you have a specific idea about which language corresponds to the script? I don't know which language it is, so I don't know which are all the sounds of that language.

...

What I meant was that in his system (the charts he posted on his video), he was mapping the Voynichese characters to specific sounds (he was saying the sounds out loud in the video) and was using several VMS glyphs to represent similar sounds which leaves a very reduced pool of glyphs to represent the others but he did not resolve that issue in the video or, to my knowledge, on his blog.


Whatever he may have said to Nick about bigraphs and trigraphs is not relevant until it's established that they exist. Nick knows the math on bigraphs and trigraphs and is completely aware that it increases the pool of sounds (as does everyone on the forum who understands the math, including me) and doesn't need to hear basic high school math concepts from Bax.

The point is that the system shown on the video (and which has not been substantively altered since that time) did not work that way, the information on bigraphs is rhetorical until it is incorporated into the system that was visually presented to us. If Bax has revised it, he needs to post it, because unfortunately, we cannot see what is in his head.